HTC seems to be selling the Explorer as a phone for people new to smartphones. But from the time we've spent with it, people who have owned other Android handsets - or even iPhones - before might be quite keen to get their hands on one of these.

For a start, it's tiny. It's more in the Wildfire S camp than the likes of the Sensation or Motorola's delightful Razr. But that will, no doubt, suit some people. We can see this phone being offered to people who use their phones infrequently, or those who currently have feature phones. Parents, to be frank, are the sort we can see getting one of these from their network.

But that's great news, because the 3.2-inch, bright, colourful and detailed screen is much better than we'd expected - it looks better than the Wildfire by a long way. It's got HTC's Sense 3.5 interface too - with the ring to unlock, and fast shortcuts to apps.

Power-wise, it's not a supercomputer. There's a 600MHz CPU - a Cortex A5, with a side-helping of Qualcomm's Snapdragon and an Adreno 200 GPU. RAM is a little limited, at 512MB and storage is just as bad, offering the same again for your apps. There's a microSD slot though, which means up to 32GB of storage for music and photos.

It's powered by Android 2.3, which is more than enough for a handset this size, aimed at the market it is. There's a 3-megapixel camera on-board too, which is likely to produce reasonable snaps, although don't expect too much from it.

All in all, we're impressed based on our short time with it. Expect a comprehensive review soon.